Posted: 12/12/07
BaptistWay Bible Series for December 16
Live the unbound life
• Mark 2:13-17, 23—3:6
Christ Church, Rockwall
As Mark establishes earlier in chapter 2, Jesus is set at odds against the religious leaders of his time. Keep in mind Mark’s announcement of this Gospel as the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (1:1). The people in political and religious power (the Jewish scribes, the Pharisees, the Herodians and the Sadducees) do not agree with Mark’s definition of Jesus’ identity. Because they don’t see eye-to-eye with Mark about the fundamental nature of who Jesus is, they become more and more offended by all he says and does, because it conflicts with their interpretations and practices of the rules and regulations of the Torah.
These are neither simple nor respectful disagreements over minor points of belief. To the authorities and powers-that-be, Jesus is desecrating everything their Jewish religion holds near and dear. To the Jewish leaders, Jesus is a religious felon who needs to be punished for his crimes against God’s law. He eats with sinners and those who pollute religious purity.
Yet Jesus says that these are the same people who need to be helped (2:15-17). To add insult to injury, Jesus threatens the Pharisees’ sensibilities about keeping the Sabbath holy. Jesus subordinates the rules of the Sabbath to the needs of the people. He says the Sabbath was made to serve human beings. Human beings were not made to serve the Sabbath.
Perhaps more than anything else, the controversy about the Sabbath sets the context for this series of exchanges between the scribes and Pharisees and Jesus. The reason is that Jesus reveals the compassion of God toward people. He is not arbitrarily “thumbing his nose” at authority. Jesus was not simply opposed to the law per se, he was opposed to the way the law was used to oppress people rather than make them free from the burden of work.
Ironically, the very commandment intended to unburden people from work actually became a burden in and of itself. Jesus was clear that he came to fulfill the law, not abolish it. Therefore, Jesus wants to fulfill the law by helping people understand the commandment about keeping Sabbath as it was meant to be practiced in the first place. If the Sabbath was intended to help people rest, then surely other practices to help people like healing, saving a life or feeding a hungry person would serve to enrich the Sabbath, not defame it.
To be sure, Mark never portrays Jesus as opposing the law despite his differences with the so-called keepers of the law. Overall, Jesus differed from the scribes and Pharisees over the law being a servant rather than a master. The reality Jesus conveys is that the religious leaders had desecrated the law of God by turning it in to something that burdened people rather than served people.
In his book Jesus Before Christianity, Albert Nolan highlights this: “The scribes had made the Sabbath, like so many other law, into an intolerable burden. They were using the Sabbath against people instead of using it for them. The law as they saw it was supposed to be a yoke, a penance, an oppressive measure; whereas for Jesus it was supposed to be used for the benefit of people, to serve their needs and genuine interests. We have here two different attitudes to law, two different opinions about its purpose and therefore two different ways of using it. The attitude of the scribes leads to casuistry, legalism, hypocrisy and suffering. Jesus’ attitude led to permissiveness whenever the needs of people would not be met by observance of the law, and to strictness whenever this would best serve their needs.”
Said another way, the rub of differences comes when we realize Jesus believed rules and regulations should serve the person; the person is not made to serve the rules and regulations. When those rules and regulations begin to function in a way that burdens people, then those rules and regulations have ceased to serve any beneficial function. The scribes and Pharisees were ready to serve the rules and regulations even if it meant a person’s quality of life would suffer because of it.
The religious leaders of his time reduced the dynamic, personal relationship with God to an impersonal set of moral absolutes and easy-to-remember rules. Likewise today, sometimes we prefer to know what the religious or cultural rules and boundaries are, and then we commit to do our best not to break or bend any of them. We want to know what we can do and what we are forbidden to do and still have God or society accept us. Yet God’s gospel of free grace transcends cold, calculated rules.
When we watch Jesus in these exchanges in Mark, God’s law of love is a holy unruliness that defies a series of black and white technicalities. When rules exist alone, they are the law minus love. Jesus seeks to marry the rule of law with the law of love. In so doing, love keeps the law from becoming oppressive and the law keeps love from becoming licentious. Jesus is faithful to the law by being faithful in loving others, even when it means breaking the rules.
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